there's a scene where John Belushi goes to visit Dan Aykroyd in his apartment

in Chicago for the very first time.

It's a cramped, tiny space

and it's just three feet away from the train tracks.

As John sits on Dan's bed,

a train goes rushing by,

rattling everything in the room.

John asks, "How often does that train go by?"

Dan replies, "So often, you won't even notice it."

And then, something falls off the wall.

We all know what he's talking about.

As human beings, we get used to everyday things

really fast.

As a product designer, it's my job to see those everyday things,

to feel them, and try to improve upon them.

For example, see this piece of fruit?

See this little sticker?

That sticker wasn't there when I was a kid.

But somewhere as the years passed,

someone had the bright idea to put that sticker on the fruit.

Why?

So it could be easier for us

to check out at the grocery counter.

Well that's great,

we can get in and out of the store quickly.

But now, there's a new problem.

When we get home and we're hungry

and we see this ripe, juicy piece of fruit on the counter,

we just want to pick it up and eat it.

Except now, we have to look for this little sticker.

And dig at it with our nails, damaging the flesh.

Then rolling up that sticker --

you know what I mean.

And then trying to flick it off your fingers.

(Applause)

It's not fun,

not at all.

But something interesting happened.

See the first time you did it, you probably felt those feelings.

You just wanted to eat the piece of fruit.

You felt upset.

You just wanted to dive in.

By the 10th time,

you started to become less upset

and you just started peeling the label off.

By the 100th time, at least for me,

I became numb to it.

I simply picked up the piece of fruit,

dug at it with my nails, tried to flick it off,

and then wondered,

"Was there another sticker?"

So why is that?

Why do we get used to everyday things?

Well as human beings, we have limited brain power.

And so our brains encode the everyday things we do into habits

so we can free up space to learn new things.

It's a process called habituation

and it's one of the most basic ways, as humans, we learn.

Now, habituation isn't always bad.

Remember learning to drive?

I sure do.

Your hands clenched at 10 and 2 on the wheel,

looking at every single object out there --

the cars, the lights, the pedestrians.

It's a nerve-wracking experience.

So much so, that I couldn't even talk to anyone else in the car

and I couldn't even listen to music.

But then something interesting happened.

As the weeks went by, driving became easier and easier.

You habituated it.

It started to become fun and second nature.

And then, you could talk to your friends again

and listen to music.

So there's a good reason why our brains habituate things.

If we didn't, we'd notice every little detail,

all the time.

It would be exhausting,

and we'd have no time to learn about new things.

But sometimes, habituation isn't good.

If it stops us from noticing the problems that are around us,

well, that's bad.

And if it stops us from noticing and fixing those problems,

well, then that's really bad.

Comedians know all about this.

Jerry Seinfeld's entire career was built on noticing those little details,

those idiotic things we do every day that we don't even remember.

He tells us about the time he visited his friends

and he just wanted to take a comfortable shower.

He'd reach out and grab the handle and turn it slightly one way,

and it was 100 degrees too hot.

And then he'd turn it the other way, and it was 100 degrees too cold.

He just wanted a comfortable shower.

Now, we've all been there,

we just don't remember it.

But Jerry did,

and that's a comedian's job.

But designers, innovators and entrepreneurs,

it's our job to not just notice those things,

but to go one step further and try to fix them.

See this, this person,

this is Mary Anderson.

In 1902 in New York City,

she was visiting.

It was a cold, wet, snowy day and she was warm inside a streetcar.

As she was going to her destination, she noticed the driver opening the window

to clean off the excess snow so he could drive safely.

When he opened the window, though, he let all this cold, wet air inside,

making all the passengers miserable.

Now probably, most of those passengers just thought,

"It's a fact of life, he's got to open the window to clean it.

That's just how it is."

But Mary didn't.

Mary thought,

"What if the diver could actually clean the windshield from the inside

so that he could stay safe and drive

and the passengers could actually stay warm?"

So she picked up her sketchbook right then and there,

and began drawing what would become the world's first windshield wiper.

Now as a product designer, I try to learn from people like Mary

to try to see the world the way it really is,

not the way we think it is.

Why?

Because it's easy to solve a problem that almost everyone sees.

But it's hard to solve a problem that almost no one sees.

Now some people think you're born with this ability

or you're not,

as if Mary Anderson was hardwired at birth to see the world more clearly.

That wasn't the case for me.

I had to work at it.

During my years at Apple,

Steve Jobs challenged us to come into work every day,

to see our products through the eyes of the customer,

the new customer,

the one that has fears and possible frustrations

and hopeful exhilaration that their new technology product

could work straightaway for them.

He called it staying beginners,

and wanted to make sure that we focused on those tiny little details

to make them faster, easier and seamless for the new customers.

So I remember this clearly in the very earliest days of the iPod.

See, back in the '90s,

being a gadget freak like I am,

I would rush out to the store for the very, very latest gadget.

I'd take all the time to get to the store,

I'd check out, I'd come back home, I'd start to unbox it.

And then, there was another little sticker:

the one that said, "Charge before use."

What!

I can't believe it!

I just spent all this time buying this product

and now I have to charge before use.

I have to wait what felt like an eternity to use that coveted new toy.

It was crazy.

But you know what?

Almost every product back then did that.

When it had batteries in it,

you had to charge it before you used it.

Well, Steve noticed that

and he said,

"We're not going to let that happen to our product."

So what did we do?

Typically, when you have a product that has a hard drive in it,

you run it for about 30 minutes in the factory

to make sure that hard drive's going to be working years later

for the customer after they pull it out of the box.

What did we do instead?

We ran that product for over two hours.

Why?

Well, first off, we could make a higher quality product,

be easy to test,

and make sure it was great for the customer.

But most importantly,

the battery came fully charged right out of the box,

ready to use.

So that customer, with all that exhilaration,

could just start using the product.

It was great, and it worked.

People liked it.

Today, almost every product that you get that's battery powered

comes out of the box fully charged,

even if it doesn't have a hard drive.

But back then, we noticed that detail and we fixed it,

and now everyone else does that as well.

No more, "Charge before use."

So why am I telling you this?

Well, it's seeing the invisible problem,

not just the obvious problem, that's important,

not just for product design, but for everything we do.

You see, there are invisible problems all around us,

ones we can solve.

But first we need to see them, to feel them.

So, I'm hesitant to give you any tips

about neuroscience or psychology.

There's far too many experienced people in the TED community

who would know much more about that than I ever will.

But let me leave you with a few tips that I do,

that we all can do, to fight habituation.

My first tip is to look broader.

You see, when you're tackling a problem,

sometimes, there are a lot of steps that lead up to that problem.

And sometimes, a lot of steps after it.

If you can take a step back and look broader,

maybe you can change some of those boxes

before the problem.

Maybe you can combine them.

Maybe you can remove them altogether to make that better.

Take thermostats, for instance.

In the 1900s when they first came out, they were really simple to use.

You could turn them up or turn them down.

People understood them.

But in the 1970s,

the energy crisis struck,

and customers started thinking about how to save energy.

So what happened?

Thermostat designers decided to add a new step.

Instead of just turning up and down,

you now had to program it.

So you could tell it the temperature you wanted at a certain time.

Now that seemed great.

Every thermostat had started adding that feature.

But it turned out that no one saved any energy.

Now, why is that?

Well, people couldn't predict the future.

They just didn't know how their weeks would change season to season,

year to year.

So no one was saving energy,

and what happened?

Thermostat designers went back to the drawing board

and they focused on that programming step.

They made better U.I.s,

they made better documentation.

But still, years later, people were not saving any energy

because they just couldn't predict the future.

So what did we do?

We put a machine-learning algorithm in instead of the programming

that would simply watch when you turned it up and down,

when you liked a certain temperature when you got up,

or when you went away.

And you know what?

It worked.

People are saving energy without any programming.

So, it doesn't matter what you're doing.

If you take a step back and look at all the boxes,

maybe there's a way to remove one or combine them

so that you can make that process much simpler.